Update: Application deadline has been extended! Applications are now being accepted on a rolling basis. Travel and expenses related to the workshop will be covered for the 20 workshop participants as part of an NSF-funded IUSE grant. This workshop will train instructors in the use of the Avida-ED software package, developed to help students learn about evolution and the nature of science, so that workshop participants can both implement classroom interventions using this software and also train other educators. Teams of two will learn to use Avida-ED and how to best incorporate it into courses that they teach. This year, we are offering two summer workshop options: one June 12-14, 2019 at the University of Texas in Austin, TX; the other August 7-9, 2019 at Michigan State University, in East Lansing, MI. For more information go to our Active LENS Workshop page.

Avida-ED wins ISAL Award

Avida-ED was the 2017 winner of the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL) Education and Outreach Award. The award was announced at the Artificial Life conference, which was held September 4-8 in Lyon, France. Congratulations to everyone who has worked on the Avida-ED project over the years!

News and Events

• June 2018: The fifth national Avida-ED Active LENS Workshop for faculty was held at the North Carolina A&T campus in Greensboro.

• August 2018: The sixth national Avida-ED Active LENS Workshop for faculty was held at the Michigan State University campus in East Lansing.

• Wendy R. Johnson and Amy Lark. 2018. Evolution in Action in the Classroom: Engaging Students in Science Practices to Investigate and Explain Evolution by Natural Selection. The American Biology Teacher 80(2): 92-99

• Robert T. Pennock & Mike Wiser. “Avida-ED: a web-based, GUI implementation of the Avida software platform, for educational use.” Workshop at European Conference on Artificial Life. Lyon, France. (9/7/17)

• June 21-23, 2017: The third national Avida-ED Active LENS Workshop for faculty was held at the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action at the University of Washington in Seattle.

• July 27-29, 2017: The fourth national Avida-ED Active LENS Workshop for faculty was held at the Michigan State University campus.

INSTRUCTOR COMMENTS
The following representative comments are taken from interviews with instructors
in a national study of classroom use of Avida-ED.

– “I want students to be engaged in something that is their own. [Avida-ED gives them] the opportunity to go in and interact with the process. … We can play out fairly complex relationships in a short amount of time. … The flexibility allows the students to have a much richer experience than some of the other kinds of labs that you see people doing.” – Small University Professor- “We have run real-time evolution experiments with microbes, however, there is no other system that allows students to focus on the most important aspects of experimental science (hypothesis generation, experiment design/implementation/re-design/analysis, etc.) than Avida-ED. Avida-ED allows the students to concentrate on the “thinking” parts of experimental science as opposed to the “doing” parts.” – Research University Professor

– “Avida-ED is the only tool out there students can use to explore the dynamics of evolution. It allows them to see an active model of evolution and understand what a mechanism is.” – HBCU Professor

– “I liked the idea of [Avida-ED] being more open ended, so I could say I want you to define a question and see if you can explore it in this environment. That was different from a lot of the other computer-based [educational software] that were geared to teaching a particular fact about the model or microevolution or whatever.” – Research University Professor, upper division course

– “For me it was having the students work with something hands-on rather than giving them a case study that we were telling them about. They could do something with it.” – Lab Instructor in Residential College

– “Avida-ED makes me think that people are capable of understanding [evolution]. I have rejected what most people say, that most people aren’t going to get this, the general population can’t get this, it’s too hard. And [I say], no, the general population isn’t getting this because we’re not giving them experiences like Avida-ED.” – High School AP Biology Teacher

Avida-ED is discussed in the 10 Feb. 2006 issue of Science.

Avida-ED has been used in biology classes in universities and colleges such as Arizona State, Cornell, Grinnel, Harvard, North Carolina A&T, Univ. of Texas, Univ. of Washington, Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison and many more.

Avida-ED won the 2012 Excellence Award in Interdisciplinary Scholarship given by the MSU Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society.

Avida-ED is an award-winning educational application developed at Michigan State University for undergraduate biology courses to help students learn about evolution and scientific method by allowing them to design and perform experiments to test hypotheses about evolutionary mechanisms using evolving digital organisms.